Merged Agencies: State, Ethnography, and Native Intelligentsia in the Early Soviet Central Asian Nation-Building

Research Article

Abstract

This paper offers a tribute to and a critical review of three seminal works on early Soviet nation-building: Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire (2001), Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations (2005), and Adeeb Khalid’s Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform (1998) and Making Uzbekistan (2015). The question of the origins of nations as modern collective identities remains especially sensitive in the post-Soviet context, where imperial, postcolonial, nationalist, and decolonial discourses compete to establish a dominant historical narrative. Originally conceived as a series of argumentative reviews written during graduate coursework in Eurasian Studies at Nazarbayev University in 2022, the article situates these historiographic debates within the institutional development of the field in Kazakhstan and asks why these three readings have become core to understanding early Soviet nation-building. The paper reconstructs Martin's model of the state as the principal architect of indigenization and its later reversal under the Great Retreat; Hirsch's account of ethnographers as indispensable experts who translated imperial knowledge into Bolshevik categories of nationality; and Khalid's portrait of native Jadid intellectuals as active co-authors, rather than passive objects, of the Uzbek national project. Rather than treating the state, the ethnographic community, and the native intelligentsia as competing explanatory frameworks, the article argues that these three focal points describe interchangeable and often overlapping agencies within a single, merged process of Soviet nation-building. A brief comparison between the Jadid intelligentsia of Uzbekistan and the Alash intelligentsia of Kazakhstan illustrates how the weight of these agencies shifted depending on regional configurations of colonization and local elite formation. The paper concludes by reflecting on its own historiographical position: written by a beginner decolonial-minded scholar in a formative year for Eurasian Studies as a discipline, it is best read today as an “archaeography” of the field circa 2022, at a moment when questions of national identity felt almost existential. Revisited now, amid a broader turn toward skepticism about decolonial frameworks, the article invites reconsideration of the reading lists and theoretical commitments shaping the study of Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia.